marxism on wgn-fm

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Sun Feb 18 09:18:43 PST 2001


At 21:20 17/02/01 -0800, you wrote:
>http://tribapps.tribune.com/rafiles/wgnam/shows/ex720/Audio/marxmr.ram
>
>http://www.nd.edu/~remarx/index2.html

OK what I got from this was

1. the chairperson saying many people in US universities remain impressed by Marx

2.Erik Olin Wright arguing that it is better to talk about the Marxist Tradition as a terrain of debate rather than Marxism, and

3.David Ruccio, Editor of Rethinking Marxism, arguing that a core concept of marxism is class exploitation.

None of these would of course be sufficient for Lenin.

I did not listen beyond the first 5 minutes and more may have been said, but the fear is that this is academic marxism, legal marxism.

Without getting thrown onto the defensive with dogmatically re-stated terminology about the "dictatorship of the proletariat", is there not a way consistently of bringing forward the question of the enormous disparities in power between people of different classes, the self-perpetuating nature of these, and the effort required to change these, without hoping that this will inevitably involve bloodshed.

For my part I think the residual features of marxism which are indispensible but necessarily at a high level of abstraction, are to recapture the relevance of

1) a dialectical materialist approach

2) the law of value

Chris Burford



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